Sunday August 13, 2017

Apollo Accelerators, the team behind the Apollo range of accelerator boards for Amiga computers, is releasing a new product called the Vampire V4: it will be a standalone item featuring a 68080 CPU core and complete SAGA chipset. While the Amiga platform died when Commodore went bankrupt, there is still a lot of enthusiasm in the line of microcomputers that brought mouse-driven GUIs and graphics to the masses.

Apollo's produced similar devices before, but says the V4 should outpace its older models thanks to its use of an Altera Cyclone V A5 FPGA to fill the role once played by Motorola silicon. There's also 512MB of RAM, 40-and-44-pin FastIDE connectors, Ethernet, a pair of USB ports and MicroSD for storage. Micro USB gets power to the board. Full specs can be had here [PDF]. Apollo hasn't set a price for the Vampire, but warns it will exceed that of previous models due to more expensive components. The company plans to make accelerator boards first, then get around the standalone systems.